Vista Kernel

In a blog post earlier this week, Microsoft's Chris Flores said that Windows 7 will be an evolution of the Vista kernel and one of our design goals for Windows 7 is that it will run on the recommended hardware we specified for Windows Vista and that the applications and devices that work with Windows Vista will be compatible with Windows 7.

Improved energy efficiency and battery life

According to another session at the conference, a single application will help reduce mobile battery life (presumably in laptops and other mobile devices) by up to 30 per cent.

Windows 7 will provide advances for building energy-efficient applications.

The session write-up says: "In this session we will discuss how to leverage new Windows infrastructure to reduce application power consumption and efficiently schedule background tasks and services."

Web Services in Native code

According to a session on Web services, Windows 7 will introduce a new networking API to support building SOAP based Web services in native code. It's likely to have native support for running virtual hard disks, specifically disk images in Microsoft's own VHD format.